Outdoor work area + driveway roof with hoist

[jdurand]

Da, the snow was just a "little" deeper than normal. At least it doesn't stay around too long. 2020 is a year of "interesting" events.

Here's the house site on 2018-12-12



and here is was during the snow last week, 2020-12-21



and then yesterday looking out the bedroom window

[jdurand]

Still waiting for the steel to arrive for the posts.

While waiting, here's a drone video of the house and area made by friends.

[jdurand]

Well, all the parts have been delivered and they're putting up the posts. I'll have pictures when they start putting the trusses up, they didn't feel like taking any of a pile of parts and posts in progress.

[Slim-123]

Хороший, большой и красивый дом.
Счастливого Рождества!! Счастья и благополучия в дом!!

[jdurand]

Хороший, большой и красивый дом.
Счастливого Рождества!! Счастья и благополучия в дом!!

We asked for a modest house, but when you hire top people to do the work and they take it as an honor to be working for The American Engineers, they tend to go a bit on the fancy side. The floor plan mostly follows what we drew, although they refused to use American stair pitch...said it's too steep for their code so it took a week of redesigning to make a stairway fit. Of COURSE they hadn't mentioned the stair change until the walls were up (spaced to fit our American stairs) and they even had started putting in forms for what they were going to do. Nope, we eventually got a compromise approved that we can live with...just have to be careful to not fall down after having grown up with USA stair pitch.

There's also been a door moved, a window moved, things like that. But, overall it's our design (revision 42 or something).

The fireplace is a good example of "modest". In California we have a steel wood stove for extra heat, very efficient, low smoke, heats the whole house to WARM. We asked for either a steel stove or a Russian fireplace (with the chambers in it to extract heat). Well, they hired the top fireplace guy in S. Russia and we discussed some ideas, then he started building. And building. And when he was done he noticed he had more stones left so built some more. This DOES have interior chambers that I'm not allowed to discuss (trade secret), but here's the builder in front of his creation.

The fireplace is actually sunken into the wall to the outer layer of bricks, so it's around 40cm deep inside the wall plus what's in front of the wall.

[Slim-123]

Камин шикарный!!

[jdurand]

Work is currently paused partway done, it's snowing AGAIN!

[jdurand]

Finally, the show melted so they could start installing the cover.

As of yesterday they got the posts in between rainstorms. I hope they have drain holes in them! If not, we'll add ones when we get there.

[jdurand]

FINALLY the snow melted enough for them to get back to work. Everything in Russia happens "soon", but one must understand the subtle meaning of "soon" (скоро).

They assure us snow like this shouldn't happen in this area. Glad to hear that but also glad the insulation and heating system was approved by people from Siberia.

After all this time in poorly insulated houses in America we're amazed that a 27 kW gas heater (92,000 BTU including domestic hot water) is keeping this 2600 square foot house comfortably warm. In California we have a lot bigger heater on a house with a heated area half that size (the shop IS heated in the new house).

[jdurand]

PROGRESS!

Main roof up, side panels and track for hoist still need to go in as well as finishing the rain gutter. I'm sure the guys like working there a lot more since now they're out of the rain.

The work area (square-ish area in front of workshop) is about 16 feet wide x 13 feet deep. The porch will have a swing out railing to double as a loading dock.